Landscape with a boat. End of 1880 Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860-1900)

Description of Isaac Levitan’s painting Landscape with Steamboat

Nature is beautiful, full of mysteries, riddles and beauty, to which many in the bustle of days simply do not pay attention, and it is best seen by landscape artists, romantics of fields and forests, rivers and seas. They can spot that special light that ordinary people don’t even notice, they can see how beautiful a summer night is, and not only see but also put it on canvas.

For each landscape painter, nature reserves something of its own, and, holding out his brush for paint, he puts his own view into the picture. Not just the world around - but the world as the artist sees it. To look at the paintings of Levitan in this sense is very pleasant. His look is full of love for the world, attention to detail, kindness and tenderness. The most ordinary things in his landscapes seem even more beautiful than they really are. Filled with meaning.

So the "landscape with the steamboat" might not have attracted the viewer’s attention if it was in real life. If one were to walk past it with a sack on one’s shoulders, feeling the warm dust underfoot and leaden fatigue in the whole body. In the museum, however, it allows you to look at yourself in all its glory, to look at the huts nestled by the river, at the river itself, smooth, shiny and unhurried.

To the steamer that sails majestically and slowly, reflecting in the water and attracting the eye. To the low, full of clouds, sky. The landscape is beautiful because it is static, because it is imbued with the artist’s love for the homeland, for its nature, for the way this nature combines with man and the work of his hands. The huts in the painting seem to be part of the landscape. The steamboat blends into it organically.

Everything looks natural and whole, the way it should be. And even if a burly peasant woman comes out of her hut to do laundry by the river, this naturalness won’t be ruined, it won’t become strained. Everything fits too well and is very beautiful in its unity.